Articles
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9 Biggest Mistakes with CSS Grid
CSS Grid is groundbreaking new technology for web design. In her newest Layout Land video, Jen Simmons explains the 9 Biggest Mistakes people are making as they adopt this new technology, with advice and tips for avoiding pitfalls and breaking old habits.
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360° Images on the Web, the Easy Way
One of the most popular uses for VR today is 360° images and video. These are easy to discover and share online, and you don’t need to learn any new interactions to explore the 360° experience. But building 360° views is not as easy as exploring them. In this post, Josh shows you how to easily build a 3D tour using A-Frame and Glitch.
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MDN Changelog for June 2018
Our monthly changelog documents what happened in June to the code, data, and tools that support MDN Web Docs site. The team shipped 100+ HTML interactive examples in June. They additional shipped tweaks and fixes by merging 252 pull requests, including 32 pull requests from 26 new contributors. Finally, the team shipped Django 1.11 and laid the groundwork for a variety of performance enhancements that will roll out in July and beyond.
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Dark Theme Darkening: Better Theming for Firefox Quantum
A team of computer science students from Michigan State University's capstone program went to work on Firefox Quantum’s Theming API. Their goal: Expand upon the existing “lightweight” Theming API in Quantum to allow for more areas of customization. Themes had the ability to alter the appearance of the default toolbars, but did not have the ability to style menus, or customize auto-complete popups -- till now. The team also worked on adding a more fluid transition when dynamic themes change, to allow for a smoother user experience.
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AV1: next generation video – The Constrained Directional Enhancement Filter
AV1 is a new general-purpose video codec developed by the Alliance for Open Media. The alliance began development of the new codec using Google’s VPX codecs, Cisco’s Thor codec, and Mozilla’s/Xiph.Org’s Daala codec as a starting point. AV1 leapfrogs the performance of VP9 and HEVC, making it a next-next-generation codec. Today's post is a deep-dive into the Constrained Directional Enhancement Filter and how it came to be.
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Firefox 61 – Quantum of Solstice
Firefox 61 is now available, bringing new performance improvements that make the fox faster than ever! We're keen on the Retained Display Lists feature to improve performance while an interactive page is painted; the Accessibility Inspector baked in to our tooling to support assistive technology users; more powerful tab management for power users; and many more Dev Tools updates and enhancements.
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Retained Display Lists for improved page performance
Display list building is the process in which we collect the set of high-level items to display on screen (borders, backgrounds, text and much more), and then sort the list, according to CSS painting rules, into the correct back-to-front order. By retaining the display list and only reloading the assets that have changed since first paint, we are able to optimize painting performance especially for highly interactive pages. Look for this feature in this week's release of Firefox 61.
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@media, MathML, and Django 1.11: MDN Changelog for May 2018
May's MDN changelog highlights lots of stuff that got shipped to make MDN Web Docs so much better all the time. The team, with help from numerous contributors, migrated CSS @media and MathML compat data, prepared for Django 1.11, started tracking work in ZenHub, continued the HTML Interactive Examples project, and shipped tweaks and fixes by merging 397 pull requests, including 60 pull requests from 43 new contributors.
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Overscripted! Digging into JavaScript execution at scale
We set out to explore the unseen or non-obvious JavaScript execution events that are triggered when a user visits a webpage, and all the first- and third-party events that are set in motion when people retrieve content. To help enable more exploration and analysis, we are releasing our full set of data about JavaScript executions. This post introduces the dataset, how it was collected, and the decisions made along the way. We’ll share examples of insights discovered and provide information for participating in the associated Overscripted Web: A Mozilla Data Analysis Challenge, which we’ve launched today with Mozilla’s Open Innovation Team.
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Baby’s First Rust+WebAssembly module: Say hi to JSConf EU!
A secret project has been brewing for JSConf EU, and this weekend is the big reveal: The Arch is a larger-than-life experience that uses 30,000 colored LEDs to create a canvas for light animations. And you can take charge of this space. Using modules, you can create a light animation. But even though this is JSConf, these animations aren’t just powered by JavaScript modules. In fact, we hope you will try something new… Rust + WebAssembly.
